Azar, a Korean Chatroulette-style dating app quietly taking over the world | Hacker News Reader

Azar, a Korean Chatroulette-style dating app quietly taking over the world

restofworld.org

151 pointsimartin2k102 comments

It's interesting that you actually conduct the "date" through the app itself, which makes it a true dating app, rather than a match making app.

You could agree to move to other forms of communication though, just like dating with any other app

most of the popular swipe dating apps in the west added this feature during the quarantine, although to be fair it's still preferred to meet in person or do a facetime.

From the article:

In February, Match Group agreed to buy Azar’s parent company for $1.7 billion.

So we're still letting monopolies blatantly buy out all their competition, I see (also see: Facebook's purchases of Instagram + Whatsapp).

How do you know that this outcome was not the desired endgame for the creators. It wasn't as if they were harassed to sell.

Lastly, which "we" are you referring to?

> It wasn't as if they were harassed to sell.

Bumble founder disagreed.

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/17141308/bumble-match-group-ne...

From the article above:

"Match, which owns another popular dating app and Bumble competitor, Tinder, is suing Bumble for violating two patents and for allegedly stealing trade secrets.

It was a lawsuit made all the more intriguing considering Match wants to acquire Bumble;"

Software patents should require the source of the implementation to be published. That's the whole idea behind patents in the first place.

Exactly, you give the government a way to replicate your insight, in return you get x years of monopoly. With the first part being non-existent (didn't inventors even have to supply physical prototypes etc.?) the patent system is easy to abuse.

Monopolies aren’t hostile takeovers.

It’s companies buying competitors for market dominance with no regulatory pushback that’s the issue.

What the founders want is not terribly relevant for monopoly laws. They're for the protection of the consumers, not of the company owners.

Doesn't the Match Group own the majority of dating sites/apps used in the west? Why are we still allowing these monopolies to gobble up any and all possible competitors?

Anti trust is defanged unless the target steps on the legislatures toes.

Accountability is kind of old fashioned in the modern world if I had to opine.

Christ. There's nothing they can't get their hands on, is there?

There's Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, Grinder and plenty of other smaller apps.

But far and away the bulk of dating app traffic goes through a Match property.

Unfortunately dating apps are an area where popularity does matter. Few are going to stick around on a largely empty app.

I was banned from Tinder about a year into the pandemic. I would sometimes idly swipe over that year to pass time but wasn't having conversations. I can only conclude that something in my profile was misunderstood.

They will not explain why, but I am now banned from all Match owned properties. That more or less leaves Bumble. At least until Match owns them.

If you're in Europe, thanks to GDPR, you have the right to get the data that led to your ban, as well as the right to correct such data (and thus, potentially, appeal).

You have got to be kidding... When will someone stop Match Group, who own every dating app most people have heard of: Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime.

is this why Bumble has a stock price on NASDAQ? they are the only ones holding out against facebook dating & match.

Perhaps the solution is to launch a denial-of-service attack in the form of founding so many dating sites that Match Group can't afford to buy them all!

Alternatively there's a good business here in creating a cookie-cutter dating site concept with the intent of selling all of them to Match.

Or take it one step further and sell turn-key dating-site startups. "Optimised for a quick Match Group acquisition".

That doesn't really benefit the customers though. It just makes the problem worse.

Presumably it'd eventually make Match Group's strategy of buying up all the competitors un-viable after some time, as there'd be an ever-increasing stream of dating apps driving up the customer acquisition costs by competing with each other and Match, while making Match effectively pay for the same customers over and over again as customers get convinced to try yet another new dating app and Match has yet another acquisition target.

This entire space is really hard to make work well for users, though, because users interests are so at odds with the service providers, in that anything that helps you meet someone quickly reduces the amount of chances they have to upsell you. It's in their interest that you remain frustrated.

> users interests are so at odds with the service providers

So the real innovation that's needed is a new incentive structure.

I'm sure some site has tried to implement a system where you pay only if you end up in a long term relationship, but that seems hard to enforce once two people have each other's contact details.

Another approach that's been tried is for the government to run the site, on the basis that families are beneficial for society, while profit-seeking monopolies and incompatible silos of users are not efficient.

What I don't think has been tried yet is some sort of federated system, perhaps based on ActivityPub, where different providers all share the same distributed pool of users, and therefore can't lock you into their unreasonable pricing scheme.

The success of Mastodon shows that this service could be offered at scale for people to enjoy at zero cost. Possibly there would be an expectation that if you did find someone you really liked, you would make a donation to the one or two sites that you and your partner's profiles were hosted on, and perhaps give a testimonial at the same time.

I assume the difficulty of implementing this is that people don't want bots spamming them with private messages, nor do they want their profiles to be part of some bulk download which a rogue node tries to get away with.

People are understandably quite sensitive about what they write on dating sites, and who gets to see it, and although the safety of traditional dating sites is probably somewhat illusory, a system for moderating interactions is likely to be harder to implement well in a distributed system, and harder than moderating a microblogging service.

> Another approach that's been tried is for the government to run the site, on the basis that families are beneficial for society, while profit-seeking monopolies and incompatible silos of users are not efficient.

That sounds like a minefield. I have an additional idea: what about a dual-purpose site, one that has value for couples too? Saying this makes me realize Facebook, although their thing is new, might be able to cormer this actually...

It's the method that was employed successfully against Standard Oil as they were initially building their monopoly. Wildcatters would strike oil and look to dump their oil into the market, which would drop and or destabilize the price of oil. It was understood they could 'ransom' Standard Oil using this tactic and get sums far beyond what their operations would otherwise be worth. Rockefeller in his letters talks about buying up the worst possible operations, in rickety condition, for princely sums to prevent the wildcatters from tanking the price of oil by dumping supply. It apparently was quite the annoyance to the extremely frugal Rockefeller, the monopoly could more than afford it of course.

I’ve never heard of this. Anywhere I could read more on this?

Should match.com get the anti-trust treatment? They seem to buy most new dating sites/apps. Match Group owns Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, OurTime, Azar, and another 35+ dating sites it bought.

I'm thinking of building a decentralized dating app (without crypto). It's something like WordPress but for dating. People can host it on-premise. You can say it's like white-labelling dating app. So each community (church, gym, yoga studio, etc) can have their own dating app and don't have to live on the mercy of Match.com. This way, we can keep Match.com in check.

Same though popped up in my head, but rather than self-host, use P2P technology like SSB. Easier to use (see Manyverse), doesn't require installing servers yourself and you could easily build those communities as pub servers if needed. Otherwise just match people at random.

That still sounds technically out of reach for most non-technical people, so you’ll just end up with dating nodes filled with (mostly male) techies.

Funny trivia, "azar" means "bad luck" in Portuguese.

Also, gambling is generally referred to as "jogos de azar" ("games of bad luck" - at least in Brazil), which fits neatly into the Chatroulette reference.

That's really interesting to me, because in Spanish we have the exact same word, "azar", but from how I understand it it's just randomness (apparently according to the dictionary some of the other meanings have a negative take). We have the same expression too : "juegos de azar" for games of chance/gambling.

It's also quite close to the french equivalent : "hasard", which also means randomess and has similar usage, with "jeux de hasard".

In all cases it's an interesting fit with the Chatroulette reference.

Anyway, thanks for the insight !

Spanish (ultimately Arabic) is where the name did come from. Source: I worked at Hyperconnect and heard it from the founder who picked this name.

Huh, in French, 'hasard' (pronounced azar) means randomness in general. The spelling change is weird

That is far from the only word that sounds almost the same in French and Spanish, but with a lot of silent letters in the French spelling.

according to wiktionary, they both originate from Arabic اَلزَّهْر‎ (az-zahr, “the dice”). presumably frenchmen were simply wont to add a bunch of silent letters.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hasard https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azar

As another linguistic point, in Bulgarian 'зар' means dice

Zar in Balkan languages – it exists in e.g. Romanian and Albanian as well – is an Ottoman-era loanword from Turkish, which in turn borrowed it from Perso-Arabic (i.e. possibly directly from Arabic, but more likely through Persian mediation).

Huh, "azar" also means "illness" in Marathi (आजार), although that's not on the Wiktionary page. Coincidence or is it a loanword in Marathi as well?

according to wiktionary, they both originate from Arabic اَلزَّهْر‎ (az-zahr, “the dice”).

Just like Latin where Spanish "aleatorio" comes from: alea = dice.

Caesar's famous words "alea jacta est" = "dice has been thrown".

The "h" is necessary to indicate there is no liaison with the previous word and the "d" is an indication that that derivative words use a non-silent "d" (like "hasardeux").

In a Spanish accent (or most of them in Spain anyway) the z would be /θ/.

The Spanish pronunciation of orthographic z as /θ/ is rather late, post-16th-century. So, I would presume that French could have borrowed the word earlier than that.

I believe it was /ts/ and /dz/ before that, depending on if Old Spanish had ç or z. It's not like it went from [s] to [θ], which I think is what some people assume.

Yes, there were affricates originally, but in the meantime there was first deaffrication to /z̪/ (and then devoicing, etc.).

Wikipedia for Old Spanish says there were two distinct variants of z:

    The affricates /t͡s̻/ and /d͡z̻/ were simplified to laminodental fricatives /s̻/ and /z̻/, which remained distinct from the apicoalveolar sounds /s̺/ and /z̺/ (a distinction also present in Basque).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish#Sibilants

That's pretty interesting. I don't have any experience distinguishing between sounds like that but reading around I start to wonder if I might produce such differences without being aware of it.

which looks like 'hazard' in english, which is (from mw dictionary)

* a source of danger * the effect of unpredictable and unanalyzable forces in determining events : chance, risk * a chance event : accident * a golf-course obstacle (such as a bunker or a pond) * a game of chance like craps played with two dice

i'd guess there's a connection? i'm no word historian person though...

In Italian "gioco d'azzardo" has the exact same meaning as "juego de azar". But an "azzardo" is a dangerous or risky behavior or action (the implication being that doing it would be a gamble).

And in Polish 'hazard' just means gambling.

I wonder if that became the word for gambling, on its own, due to the strong influence of Catholicism.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the origin of hazard is as follows:

Middle English (in hazard (sense 3 of the noun)): from Old French hasard, from Spanish azar, from Arabic az-zahr ‘chance, luck’, from Persian zār or Turkish zar ‘dice’

It bears mentioning, as an interesting fact that I just found about, that azzahr comes from Andalusi Arabic, and that zahr (in Arabic) means 'flower', from which the Spanish word azahar (the white flower on some trees such as orange trees) comes.

Etymologies from the most official Spanish dictionary:

azar: Del árabe hispánico *azzahr, y este del árabe zahr 'dado'; literalmente 'flores'.

azahar: Del árabe hispánico azzahár, y este del árabe clásico zahr 'flores'.

In Russian the word азарт means the feeling of being high on gambling or on risk in general.

Yes, I would guess that in Brazilian portuguese the expression "jogos de azar" comes from this original meaning of the word "azar", as randomness. But the isolated word "azar" took on the specific meaning of "bad luck", which kind of leaked to how one would interpret "jogos de azar" around here.

"hazard" in English is also a cognate.

Azar is also the last name of former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary (Alex. M. Azar II) under President Trump during the height of COVID-19 pandemic[1].

That last name's origin is Lebanese[2].

[1]: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/01/31/secretary-azar-dec...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar

It is fairly common Persian/Hebrew name.

Reminds me of this (mildly NSFW) Silicon Valley scene[1] (though in that case he was making things up).

Also reminds me of this urban legend[2] about poor sales of the Chevy Nova in Spanish-speaking countries because "no va" means "doesn't go".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVoFzu-vH4o

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanis...

What do you know, I looked it up and the English word hazard has the same root.

oh yeah -- as in the idiom "hazard a guess"

Dukes of hazard

If I remember correctly, the founder was just a huge fan of a footballer named Eden Hazard, hence the name

More funny trivia, "azarar", as a verb, means to flirt or to successfully match up in Brazilian portuguese.

https://dicionario.priberam.org/azarar

So they can use AI to block video of users flashing or harrassing others, yet my OK Cupid profile (same parent company) continues to be full of women from the Phillippines that set their location to my city because "they're planning to move there next year" or are "just looking to make friends outside my country".

As if it wasn't bad enough that online dating was already this dehumanizing "swipe to accept/reject" rigamarole.

"Do you want to develop an app?"

You son of a bitch. I'm in.

Me too

"Azar" means Fire in Persian... sounds fitting, and related to "Tinder"!

Isn't fire "aatesh"?

Azar and Atash both mean fire[1], so yes :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azar_(name)

For anyone wondering why there is a random confetti effect opening the article — the publication is 1 year old.

No, it is anniversary Rest of the World https://restofworld.org/one-year/

I could see this as very useful for digital nomads and others who live similar lifestyles.

Want to move to Santiago, Chile next but know nobody?

Assuming this has filters, you can do "show me anyone who is interested in snowboarding around my age in Santiago" and be able to connect with people before you even land there.

Great for dating worldwide too for a variety of reasons.

Sure, it's Chatroulette, but it seems like it has a lot more potential. It's interesting that it is a South Korean company but they have clearly focused on a global concept (most of the users are not in Korea).

The more granularity and internationalization the higher likelihood it'll be used for grooming, sex trafficking, and fraud. Tinder, Snapchat, TikTok, and other mediums are already rife with it.

I agree with you, but at what point does this become "this is why we can't have nice things"?

One of the reasons dating sites like Match don't work easily worldwide is because there are too many variables. Local customs, society judging online dating, personal information that may work in one area but not another ("do you attend church on Sunday?", etc).

With the added fact it's essentially live FaceTime, you also get rid of people pretending to be a 17 year old girl when they are really a 40 year old man, or claiming they are are a US military veteran who needs some quick help when they are actually a Nigerian prince.

I wonder how these realtime content sharing services will be compatible with new EU terreg regulation. How such content is going to be moderated?

I don't think terrorists use dating apps...

Although if we could get them laid and married off they probably wouldn't be terrorists anymore.

Not really a family man career.

Did you just implied that only men could be terrorists? I thought that terrorism was a gender include activity.

Yeah, who are we kidding. It's almost exclusively men doing that. Like 95% or more.

> Like 95% or more

Interesting accuracy, I'm curious about the source. Fascinating topic in general.

Here's a good starting point for more as well: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08974454.2019.1...

Outlines a bunch of interesting factoids.

If you look at "terrorism" more as a whole than just the people going and doing the bombings and similar, like the ones raising children, taking care of the villages and such, I think you'll find that they pretty much end up like any other society.

Until someone bombs their family I suppose...

Might work for US-based mass shooters and domestic terrorists. They tend to be broken, single/divorced men carrying out planned but unstructured acts of violence.

For young men in countries where militias offer better paycheques and protection than the government can, I think you might have to come up with a more elaborate solution.

Why not? They use game chat, after all?

I don't know why you're being downvoted (unless people think you are making a crass joke about toxic gamer communities), but the idea of terrorists using online game chat to communicate was at least taken seriously by the NSA:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172288-nsa-spied-on-xbox...

It depends on how you define what a terrorist is.

Match is a plague and needs to be stopped. They homogenize all their assets and thus break dating in the same poorly thought out, woke signaling, profit driven kind of way. All dating apps are broken in the same ways because Match has broken them. It was not always this way.

Woke signalling? How?

In portuguese Azar can be translated to "bad luck", so here in Brazil I don't think it will be something catchy

> Prince, who asked to be identified by only his first name for privacy reasons

> A professional football player originally from Ghana, Prince immigrated to Turkey two years ago to join a local team

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin-Prince_Boateng

So immediately obvious to anyone following German (and probably also Turkish) football, this has to be a joke or diversion? It's not exactly a common name.

or at least anyone halfway paying attention. Maybe Prince is a common name in Ghana? Even then, the odds are really low that it's real and not him

You're probably right. Maybe it's an reference or an in-joke of some kind that we're not getting

KPB was born and raised in Germany. He has a Ghanaian passport and has represented Ghana in international competition. He's had a long career at some top clubs and definitely wouldn't need to be in Turkey for economic reasons.

He's currently playing in the Italian second division, so who knows what his financial situation is. This is probably some kind of joke, or weird reference that we're not getting

Or there could just be another footballer named Prince. It's not unheard of.

Another Ghanaian professional footballer called Prince who recently moved to play for a Turkish team local to Istanbul?

Does that seem likely to you?

TransferMarkt [0] lists 51 Ghanian footballers named Price, although it does not show any currently playing for Turkish clubs. I don't know if there is a way to search for past clubs.

0: https://www.transfermarkt.us/detailsuche/spielerdetail/suche...

huh…

Do these sites run background checks? Because people could use these apps to brainwash others to get them do what they want. Am I missing something?

can't they do that in any app? or do you mean face to face is more dangerous or something?

Not really. May be this is applicable to any app that lets anonymous people communicate in private. Dating context is more sensitive.

Eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26513413

Since my other comment got flagged, I am going to try again.

Looks like you have some very strong, yet suspiciously unclear, opinions on the matter. Do you mind articulating the point that you're trying to make?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com